The intention is to introduce you to the people who have been carving their own path...with no care for what anybody thinks.

We try not to post things that are still for sale but sometimes post things that are not easily available. If you like what you hear, then find these people and tell them how great they are.

Better still, tell them and then seek out their new releases and buy them. We add links, when they are reliable and active, so that you can keep track if you so wish.

Always go straight to the artist or the label where possible. That way, the money goes straight to the people responsible for this art. These people rely on our support to keep going and make more quality releases!

Please feel free to leave comments as you go along...at least then we know you appreciate this stuff (or otherwise) and you're not just a bunch of freeloading file collectors.

If you made this music and we have pissed you off by posting any of this, please leave a comment in the post and the offending articles will be removed.

Brian with Gastric Female Reflex who are Andrew Zukerman (who also records as Charles Balls ... I only have a couple of those and wish I had them all) and Jacob Horwood (who runs Bennifer Editions). For me, at any rate, this fits into the Schimpflux world of Crank Sturgeon, Id M Theft Able and Kommissar Hjuler but (Mama) bear in mind that I have just made that up!

The duo of Chris Shepard and Mike Mangino were very prolific, releasing around 50 albums of rough industrial pop and feedback-laced machine noise as Smersh, Gestaltung, and Neon Noodle from 1981 until the early 2000's. Most of their albums came out as self-released cassettes on their Atlas King label. They also, along with like-minded underground travelers DDAA and Bene Gessirit, seemed to have a song on just about every weirdo cassette compilation released in the 80's and 90's. Because Smersh's catalog is so vast, there have been a few attempts at wrangling their songs into "greatest hits" compilations. A few CDRs appeared and then went out of print, a couple releases given over to Free Music Archive, and most recently the Dark Entries label issued a wonderful double-LP compilation called "Cassette Pets", which is very much available direct from the label and affordably from iTunes, Bleep, all the usual sources.

Inevitably for a band with a discography so deep, lots of music continues to languish on normal bias cassette tapes that will eventually fade into iron oxide dust. This album is one of my favorites. "Slackers and Underachievers" leans heavily on more awkward noise and spacey dub. A few songs seem to include a drummer, in place of Smersh's usual Roland TR-606 thump.

This does exactly what it says on the tin! The addition of Kensaku Miyaji and Shinichiro Akiba turned the outfit into a completely different beast. The electronics are dropped allowing Maso to take on the vocal duties and give us full scale garage psych rocking out ...

Although this is only credited to Fusao Toda and Maso Yamazaki, surely this also contains Kensaku Miyaji on keyboards and Shinichiro Akiba on drums. Given that the latter pair officially joined Christine 23 Onna in 2005 to turn them into the four piece Acid Eater it kind of makes sense (or obviously it does depending on how much of a detective you think I am).

Christine 23 Onna were Fusao Toda (guitarist with Angel'in Heavy Syrup) and Maso Yamazaki (aka Masonna). Whilst Christine later dove into the world of psych garage and the title of the album is a nod to Stereolab, this is an entirely different affair. Space Age Psychedelia all the way down!

LP and C20 from Rudolf Eb.er's short-lived Wash Your Brains project. The track on the previous compilation is called Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck and I assume that signaled the change in identity which appeared the following year. All of the Schimpfluch aesthetic is clearly laid out so you know what to expect.

Crucial 6xCDR box set compiling the first five cassettes by one of the lowest-profile artists in the Schimpfluch camp, Marc Zeier aka Gorki Park aka G*Park. The last disc contains an otherwise unreleased recording of Zeier performing live with Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock. The box came out on Tochnit-Aleph in a limited edition of 77 copies, with a book of art and information and a used tea bag. Maybe that was intended to impart aroma to the box? I scanned the book, but not the tea bag.

G*Park's music defies easy description, which is a good thing indeed. It's at once tactile and organic and mysteriously inhuman, though these early tapes are not nearly as refined as Zeier would get on later albums like "Geopod" and the recent "Sub" 2xCD on 23five (available from the label and from iTunes, so go get it!). Some of these non-referential textures remind me of Hands To, Small Cruel Party, tac, Kapotte Muziek, or Yeast Culture, to give you a very general idea of the soundworld G*Park inhabits.

Gabriele de Seta with Hong Kong's Sin:Ned and Dà Xiǎo who is an experimental musician / video artist from Shanghai. The latter is also in TMISM with Xu Cheng and Huang Lei and is the founder of Ganzfeld Lab. This is a live improvised set that starts with a beautiful hovering guitar sound before evolving into chiming and rumbling noise. This is the best 21 minutes you will spend in a long time!

Naturalismo is the work of Gabriele de Seta (who you will also know as the driving force behind Caligine whilst also running the Monstres Par Excès label). Gabriele has been a resident of Hong Kong for quite a while now and here is joined by the indigenous experimental guitar of Sherman (you can also pick up three of his releases here, here and here). Contemplative and ear-shredding in turns...

Here at Bleak Bliss, we tend to only post music that is out of print, hard to find, and/or impossibly obscure. Today I'm going to try something different: I am posting an album that does not exist. "Scourge Songs Volume 1" begins what will be a multi-volume collection of rare tracks by one of my all-time favorite bands, Controlled Bleeding. The New York group has been led by Paul Lemos since the early 1980's, though they have been duos and trios at different times in their career. They have recorded harsh noise, industrial disco, medieval-ish chamber music, ambient drones, progressive rock, free improvisation, metal, dub, and probably more kinds of music than that and other music that doesn't fit neatly under a label. Essentially, CB haven't given a good hoot about what listeners might expect of them, so they've done any and everything they've felt like doing. I have so much respect for this band.

Controlled Bleeding began amid the explosion of international cassette culture. At that time, every weirdo who started a tape label were obligated to put out a comp that included tracks by Minoy, DDAA, Bene Gessirit, Smersh, Big City Orchestra, The Haters, and of course Controlled Bleeding. Because of their ubiquity, a vast amount of CB's songs are now scattered on at least 100 different compilation tapes, LPs, and CDs. Have you ever tried to keep up with this prolific band? Harder than a diamond-encrusted concrete dildo, isn't it? Well, here is some good news. Many (though certainly not all) of their disparate sonic orphans have finally been brought together in convenient album-length chunks for the good of humanity by me, Mrs. Inside. You are welcome, humanity. This first volume collects material from the earliest days of the band, 1984 and 1985. More volumes are on the way.

An hour of uncomfortable tape loops (including a guy counting in the wrong order) by two legends of US 80's/90's cassette culture, building a din that reminds me of the fuzz-brained dawn after a sleepless night. Issued on Harsh Reality in late 1980's.

John Hudak is a name well-known to readers of this blog. You might know Chris Phinney by his superhero name, Mental Anguish. He isalso the guy who ran the Harsh Reality label in Memphis TN and made this fine slab of tape hiss and toasted circuits available to the public in 1991.

Bizarre, super low-fi trash noise from Lutz Pruditsch, who would later smooth over his rough edges and make a sound more readily identifiable as "music" under the name Tarkatak. This album first appeared in the mid-1980's as a cassette on the Trummer Kassetten label, then an American edition appeared (to sate popular demand, I suppose) on Harsh Reality. This is exactly the sort of artless nonsense that cassette labels were made to enable.

Solid harsh-noise compilation CDR sold at a concert in Chicago headlined by The Rita, with local opening acts Is, Shattered Hymen, Mykel Boyd (who put this out in an edition of 100 copies on Power Silence, an imprint of his Somnimage label), Raperies (Like Draperies), Body Collector, and Augment. Everyone on the bill contributed one track to this album.

Compilation CD made to promote the "Batofar Cherche... Tokyo" festival, which occurred in December 2001 in Paris to present experimental and electronic music by artists from Tokyo. In a commendable curatorial decision, the concerts (and this disc) did not feature the usual musicians who tend to populate events of this kind. Instead, the festival organizers dug deep into the underground and brought over Take Rodruigez and His Arkestra, Com.a, Kozo Inada, L?K?O, Phenopen Model (who are not exactly unknowns in Japan, but remain obscure to listeners in other countries), Nerve Net Noise, Tujiko Noriko, Monster DVD, Kishino You-Ichi, and others.

The world of Kommissar Hjuler und Mama Baer is a very strange world indeed! Spasmodic accordion, rumbling noise that will break your house, farting pots and pans ... I don't even no where to start or end.

This is a two tape set released on Khristopher Reinshagen's (aka Body Collector and Scorpio & Glass) Nostilevo in 2001 in an edition of 44.

Miku Hatsune only exists on a literally technical basis. She is one of Crypton's characters in their Vocaloid voice synthesizer program. J-Pop Noise Hijokaidan stlye? It really shouldn't work but it does! Well, frankly, Hijokaidan can do what the hell they like!

This was released on U-Rythmix Records in 2013. The label is the sister of Tsukasa Takahashi's ("shit, why don't I have an indefinite amount of money so I can buy everything that they release") Youth Inc.

Hatsune Kaidan are now a "real" project with at least three releases under that name.

Jojo Hiroshige, Fumio Kosakai, Toshiji Mikawa, Sabu Toyozumi and Junko with Akira Sakata and it's live! Ridiculously great and to quote a track from the magnificent Hijokaidan 35th Anniversary Album released this year: "Noise Is Jazz, Jazz Is Noise".

... and I've got to admit, I love the riff on the old Deep Purple cover on this and the previous post ... the fact that they are a doff of the cap to Jon Lord makes these even more special ...

If you bought both of them on mail order and were one of the first 300 then you also got this! In my financially straightened times, I wasn't one of them ... anybody out there have it?

Hiss-slathered synth drama by Lee Tindall, who was 1/3 of Astronaut (alongside Daniel Lopatin/Oneohtrix Point Never) and is currently floating in space-age bliss as Belarisk. Self-released in 2008 as a cassette in an edition of 30 copies.

Recorded live at the Shinjuku Pit Inn, Tokyo on the 22nd of April 2005 and released on PJL in 2006. This also features the legendary Darin Gray on bass, Manabu Sakata handling percussion and electronics and the ridiculously amazing Chris Corsano on drums. Thank whatever deity you like that they recorded and released this. Stunning!